The restaurant industry continues to experience inflation driven by supply/demand, labor challenges, and driver shortages.

According to Tyson Foods, restaurants are still short 1.5MM jobs and labor costs are forecasted to rise in 2022. The Labor Shortage is impacting many areas of the industry. Not only does the shortage in workforce affect the front-of-house and the back-of-house, but it even challenges the trucking and transportation companies who move your ingredients from one location to another as they are seeing a critical shortage in drivers.

As an operator, you can’t control what happens in the supply chain – but you can control how you prepare for and handle the challenge of minimized staff and shortage of ingredients.

Keep consistent customer satisfaction and decrease the time spent on prep with these menu solutions!

Speed-Scratch Items

Prepping for the busy morning or afternoon rush can be time-consuming and require a lot of different ingredients. By utilizing speed-scratch items such as a sauces, gravies, soups, and potatoes, you can save your kitchen staff prep time and increase your profits.

Here are some speed-scratch solutions you can use on your menu:

• A leader in providing speed-scratch solutions for chefs is Unilever. With its superior taste, performance, and convenience, Unilever offers menu solutions that provide easy prep and bold rich flavors. With products such as cream based soups, sauces, bases, and liquid seasonings, deliver limitless flavor and gluten-free ingredients to your customers.
• Custom Culinary pre-made bases and sauces deliver an extensive array of chef-inspired flavor systems that will simplify your operation. Enhance your signature dishes with Custom Culinary high-quality ingredients and authentic flavors that meet true convenience in their cooked-from-scratch concentrates.
• One of the most versatile menu items has to be potatoes. Breakfast, lunch, or dinner, they can be transformed into a dreamy side dish or even the star of the show. But, from washing, pealing, chopping, and boiling, potatoes take a lot of time to prep. And with a labor shortage, your staff doesn’t always have the time to help with prep. Certified 100% Idaho Potatoes, Idahoan has many labor-saving solutions for your menu. From hashbrowns, appetizers, and mashed potatoes, use Idahoan products to save on prep time and boost your bottom line.

Scratch-Quality Proteins

Meats and proteins are another area of your operation that can require an extensive amount of time and labor. Leveraging pre-cooked meats can help provide the quality you’re looking for while demanding less prep.

With a wide variety of products available from top brands, consider solutions like:

• No more grilling breakfast sausage. Talk about saving on prep time! Hormel knows what you go through to provide a hearty breakfast. Hormel sausage is perfectly cooked. Less grease, less waste, and best of all? Less prep time. This premium breakfast favorite is fully cooked and delivers exceptional flavor, texture and appearance – without all the prepping.
• Another meat favorite is meatballs. The mixing of ingredients, rolling into balls and frying in a pan – no one has time for all that. Hormel’s traditional fully cooked meatballs are made from select cuts of beef, pork and a blend of Italian spices.
• What about pork for tacos, omelets, or a good green chili? Hormel’s fully cooked, pork carnitas is made with whole boneless pork cushion meat. It is marinated with garlic and citrus flavors and slow cooked in the bag for hours for maximum flavor and tenderness. Execute the perfect dish with this fully cooked protein.

Bread

I am pretty sure we can all eat bread for any meal of the day – toast at breakfast, a flatbread for lunch, and a gyro at dinner. Though there are many ways you can incorporate bread into your menu, prepping each type of this crowd favorite takes time and patience.

With a smaller kitchen staff, you don’t always have the bandwidth to make homemade fresh bread – especially different variations of the comfort food.

• Kontos offers over 60 varieties of flatbreads and pitas. A traditional hand-stretched baking method makes their breads light and fluffy. Their old-fashioned taste, texture, and aroma will surely have your customers thinking it was made fresh right in your restaurant!

Ready to Go Dessert

Nobody is ever too full for dessert. So, you better have some sweet after dinner options for your guests to indulge in. But with a short staff, how are you going to pull off baking cheesecakes and sweets while working the kitchen during a mad rush on your daily special?

Don’t skimp on dessert just because you don’t have a full kitchen staff.

• With solutions like Sara Lee Frozen Bakery, you can reduce labor and bring profitability to your bottom line with products such as their individually wrapped, pre-sliced and cheesecakes, Three-for-All snack and dessert bars, and pre-baked an pre-sliced pies.

Not Just About Food – Try These Labor-Saving Services

Outsourcing some of your restaurant services can also help you navigate the labor shortage. Areas such as waste and recycling, payroll, accounting, and credit card processing can all be outsourced to third party companies. Outsourcing restaurant services can save you time and even identify potential savings you could be missing.

Take a look at these labor-saving solutions for outsourcing your restaurant services.

How Can Dining Alliance Help?

As a Dining Alliance member, you get access to all sort of labor-saving solutions to help you maintain profits while working with a smaller number of staff.

We partner with manufacturers and suppliers across all categories. We offer our members over 165,000 rebated line items from over 350+ different manufacturers with product offerings from all major brands such as Tyson, McCain, Conagra, Unilever, Pepsi products and more.

Contact us today and start saving!